Month: January 2025

Give Up the Night Review

Book: Give Up the Night
Author: P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Since becoming Moonstruck on her eighteenth birthday, Wren Nightingale has found herself thrust into a world filled with deception, danger, and murder. Uncovering that their magic was fractured and limited when the original Moonstruck ritual was broken by Selene, Wren is determined to find a way to restore it. But the Elementals are split into two factions – some want the ritual completed and their freedom – and others are so terrified of change that they’re willing to end Wren before she can reach the center of the island where the ritual Selene ruined can be completed.
Between his overbearing father’s arrival, Rottingham delegated him more and more responsibility, and Celeste taking a special interest in him, Lee Young has been struggling to find his own path. As much as Lee wants to take his place in the Moonstruck hierarchy, he knows something’s not right at the Academia de la Luna. He thinks if he can talk some sense into Wren and get her to return to the Academia, that everything will turn out alright.
As Wren and Lee both battle for what they believe is right, they’ll have to uncover who their true allies are…and if they’re even on the same side of this magical fight.”

Review : Dear reader, to be completely honest with you, I’m not sure how I ended up with this early copy. Not only is Give Up the Night a sequel, to a book I didn’t read, mind you, but it’s been co-authored by two people I’m familiar with; if you’ve been here for a little while, you may remember that I reviewed the first and second books in a different trilogy written by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast, and if not, you can find them here and here – as an aside, I didn’t realize the earlier of the two reviews was written all the way back in 2021 and now I must sit in shock that I’ve been receiving review copies for four years before I can continue on.

I make a point not to request sequels, and after my last two not-so-kind reviews of the Cast’s work, I’m a little more than surprised to find this book sitting in front of me. I must have made a mistake. Nonetheless, much like last year, my plans for this year include reading and reviewing every advanced copy that comes my way, so I did read Give Up the Night even though I didn’t read Draw Down the Moon, the inaugural book in the Moonstruck trilogy. To their credit, the Casts made it easy for someone to jump in without needing a total refresher of the first book – enough details were organically rehashed by the characters within the first chapter that I didn’t struggle to understand what was happening, despite jumping in at a pivotal moment. However, I do find it difficult to review a sequel without having read the first book, so this review will likely be quite short.

I find the Casts to be adequate writers, and by that I mean they do just fine if you’re not bored with a tired trope, ready for fresh material, or want a truly new, enticing, or compelling story. It’s just fine. Nothing more. I realize this is an advanced copy, but this book was riddled with errors, something I don’t tend to see in the more well put together books I receive – so that’s worth noting. Reading this book had me wondering how much might change between an advanced copy and a first edition; for example, if you have a nonbinary character, it might be worth your time as an author to ensure that you get your own character’s pronouns correct. It might even be worth your time to figure out the pronouns of the magical beings you’ve written into your novel, wouldn’t you think? Rather than jumping around confoundingly between he and she with no real clear reasoning as to why it’s jumping around – no, this is no gender fluid creature, it’s simply poor writing. The storyline matched every damn fantasy storyline you might be familiar with and that felt like an insult to the reader : young woman in a magical world finds herself bestowed with incredible! unbelievable! magical powers after spending time thinking something is wrong with her because her peers are developing their powers as normal while she lags behind; magical creature becomes magically attached to said young woman; young woman becomes marked as special, must go on magical quest to set things right / free everyone / do something spectacular that no one else has ever been able to do before. The “quirky” and “special” angle feels wildly overplayed – I can think of four books without even trying that fit the same mold. It’s overdone.

Lastly, I did find the majority of Give Up the Night to be fairly compelling, inasmuch that I continued to turn pages for a while before I got bored. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a book doesn’t have to be well written to be compelling. Poorly written books with compelling storylines still turn pages. As we neared the ending of this book, however, things took a turn. The clear-cut narrative turned muddled, the geography became redundant, and the quest the characters found themselves on turned on it’s head in a way that made no clear sense. It felt like writing for the sake of wrapping up a book with a wild and crazy twist, not like something necessary to the storytelling at all. It was all a ploy to introduce book 3, which is fine, but not for me. Anyway, like I said…this book was fine. No more.

Advice : If you’re familiar with the Casts’ work already and enjoy it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy Give Up the Night. If you’re not or you’re looking for something that doesn’t read like a watered down Fourth Wing…try again. This one won’t be for you.

The Distractions Review

Book: The Distractions
Author: Liza Monroy
Publisher: Regalo Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Mischa Osborn spends her days as a ProWatcher – keeping distracted people on task and lonely ones accompanies – from her Brooklyn Mega-building, while eating Petri-Meat Steax and working out with her favorite personal trainer, a straight-talking algorithm named Tory.
Her carefully constructed, isolated existence is suddenly upended by a chance realspace encounter with a HighlightReel celebrity, Nicolas Adan Luchano. On their first date, hiking in Kuulsuits and watching DroneBeez pollinate flowers, Mischa experiences a brief but intense realspace connection.
Mischa takes to relentlessly watching Nic onReel. As Mischa’s ReelWatching spirals into an all-consuming obsession, and even realspace stalking, Mischa takes increasingly desperate measures to be seen and valued, sucking others into her vortex of obsession until she completely loses control.
Meanwhile, someone is equally obsessed with Mischa, tracking her every move and perhaps even influencing her choices.
A tale of how technology enables obsession, envy, and unrelenting comparison, told through an eccentric cast of interconnected characters, The Distractions invites us to reflect on who we are watching, and why.”

Review : Liza Monroy’s The Distractions asks what might happen if our lives became nothing more than content for others to watch, taking our current reality several steps beyond where we find ourselves in 2025. Set in some kind of ambiguous future – is it one hundred years, two hundred, a thousand? – The Distractions is an imagining of where our lives might take us if things were simply not to deviate from where they are in the present. In a world where we are constantly attached to our phones, where smart homes, smart watches, smart glasses, and self-driving cars are becoming more and more the norm, it’s not hard to see where Monroy’s concept was born. Mischa, our protagonist, spends years consumed with obsession, literally (no, really) losing herself to the endless succession of constantly streamed video feeds of the objects of her ever-worsening obsession. I think it’s worth noting that The Distractions reads like an addiction spiral and if you’ve found yourself in that space, this may not be the right book for you.

I’ll be the first to admit that dystopian fiction is not my favorite, to put it lightly. I wasn’t completely clear on just how dystopian this book would be until I really got into the meat of it – I knew it would be futuristic as it begins with five pages filled with verbiage necessary to understanding the world Monroy has crafted. Five. It’s a task for any author to fully create a functioning and understandable world, and while this is something I encounter more regularly in the realm of fantasy, Monroy gave herself quite the task with this book. I do think she succeeded in creating a reality that I was able to easily understand after I spent the first chapter flipping back and forth between her compendium of terms and the page I was reading. Once I got into the novel, I was able to seamlessly grasp the terms and concepts as they’re just not that far off from where we are these days and the terms we have in our common vocabulary. I will say, I found this to be less speculative and more progressive, if that makes sense! There was so little imagining of the future and truly so much speeding up from where we are – the understanding is that as a society we only evolve through technology and rampant consumerism and all the rest we just learn to live with. Like most dystopian novels, it was flat out sad.

The Distractions amplifies a world we already find ourselves living within and with an uptick in people considering leaving social media or seeking out other sources of connection, I think Monroy did herself a disservice by choosing not to be speculative. Speaking of the landscape in California, Monroy tells us that everything is on fire these days – the timing of this book feels potent; of the air quality and heat index, one can only step outside while wearing a protective suit and most choose to stay inside instead; of food, we see Mischa et al consuming lab grown “meat” and cricket powders; of bird populations, well, there aren’t any. It’s all so reminiscent of our current reality that as things do change and progress and we, ideally, evolve beyond our need to consume at all costs, I think The Distractions will, at least in small part, become irrelevant and that’s a tough thing for a dystopian futuristic novel. And I don’t think I’m being overly optimistic here, but maybe I am. I just tend to expect that the current and immediate future generations will find ways to connect with each other outside of online spaces, particularly as our online spaces take a turn for the worse.

Where this book fell flat for me, is in the functional flow of the narration and the content within. While written well and given appropriate pacing, particularly as we witness Mischa losing literal years of her life, it felt as though it wasn’t a fully thought out concept outside the actual obsession that comprised 85% of the book. Monroy initially describes Mischa as preferring to keep to herself, to not engage with other humans, and to appropriately divvy up her time. However, the downward spiral into obsession came on quickly, as though this wasn’t the first time it happened, and the inability to even see glimpses of Mischa’s past life felt off. I realize the nature of addiction looks different to everyone, but it felt incomplete, as if we were missing crucial details about Mischa’s life prior to beginning the book. Likewise, the ending of the book was a convoluted, confusing mess that left me wondering why it was written the way it was. I was left with questions that might have served as intriguing methods of concluding the book but instead grew tangled the more Monroy attempted to explain them. It didn’t feel neat, it felt needlessly messy; I can be completely content with messy if it’s purposeful and intentional and meets the standard of the entirety of the book, but this was not that. Finally, yes, Mischa was being watched the entire time, we know this because there’s a second narrator, but the finale (and the back of the book) make this narrator out to be much more sinister than they came across in our time spent with them – and I found the details of just how this being watched Mischa to be convoluted and confusing at best. There’s so little explanation for the voyeur that it almost felt like I wasn’t meant to question it, but of course I did because there was no explanation…you see my problem?

Ultimately, this was an interesting concept that reminded me at times of the movie Wall-E and at times of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I could go on for many more paragraphs about the implications of AL (advanced algorithms in The Distractions), the ethics presented in this book, of autonomous artificial intelligence, and our perceived humanity within the complex matrix of technology, but I’ll leave it here. The Distractions was interesting and clearly fleshed out in ways I will never be able to grasp, but it felt incomplete and perhaps even unnecessary, or at least I can hope. And maybe that’s all that can really be said about a dystopian novel, at the end of the day. It makes you hope and wish for a better future, and this book certainly did that for me.

Advice : If you, like me, aren’t the biggest fan of dystopian fiction, if you prefer speculative fiction, or you’re horrified by the idea of AI or social media taking over our lives, this may not be for you. If you enjoy the ethics and philosophy behind all of the above, you may just well love this one.

Lollapolooza Review

Book: Lollapalooza
Author: Richard Bienstock & Tom Beaujour
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Year: 2025
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Through hundreds of new interviews with artists, tour founders, festival organizers, promoters, publicists, sideshow freaks, stage crews, record label execs, reporters, roadies and more, Lollapalooza chronicles the iconic music festival’s pioneering 1991-1997 run, and, in the process, alternative rock’s rise – as well as the reverberations that led to a massive shift in the music industry and the culture at large.
Lollapalooza features original interviews with some of the biggest names in music, including Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Ice-T, Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, Patti Smith, Alice in Chains, Metallica and many more.
[…]
A nostalgic look back at 1990s music and culture, Lollapalooza traces the festival’s groundbreaking origins, following the tour as it progresses through the decade, and documenting the action onstage, backstage, and behind-the-scenes in detailed and uncensored and sometimes shocking first-person accounts. This is the story of Lollapalooza and the 1990s alternative rock revolution.”

Review : Lollapalooza is a tremendous body of work, indicative of the importance Lollapalooza holds in the annals of alternative, and mainstream, rock history. Bienstock and Beaujour have done a masterful job of showcasing just how revolutionary the conception of such an event was in the 1990s and the impact it’s had on the world of traveling festivals and tours as much as thirty years later. Though I haven’t reviewed many books about music, you may remember my review of Rise of a Killah last year – I found it difficult at times to connect with a book whose stories didn’t relate to me as someone who isn’t a die-hard fan of the Wu-Tang Clan; there was so much that went unsaid, without prior knowledge, some things felt hard to discern. I can definitively say Lollapalooza did not suffer from the same issues for someone, like me, who isn’t necessarily a lifelong fan of some, if not many, of the bands who played during the seminal 1991-1997 run of the festival. While there were many bands and artists whose work I’m familiar with to varying degrees, there were, of course, many whose work I’m unfamiliar with – particularly those who played on the second-stage, designated for local, indie, up-and-comers, and performance art / spoken word (at times). At no point was I lost. Bienstock and Beaujour covered an absolute mountain of information and did so in a wildly comprehensive way, anything that I might have gone “…wait, what?” about was cleanly and thoughtfully explained through hundreds of interviews, not only detailing events, but doing so in a way that felt approachable and easy to imagine.

Throughout this ridiculous honker of a book I found myself, at multiple stages, completely staggered by the sheer volume of work that went into the story telling. Laid out in a format I initially found myself disinterested in, each year is formatted through varying chapters that are told exclusively through the words of band members, backstage hands, tour founders, managers, journalists, and more. Each chapter is broken up by these exclusive interviews, which I immediately thought would leave the book feeling choppy and broken, but in fact read like a conversation with all the people who had a front row seat to the US’ first real traveling music festival. It was an incredible feat, I can’t even fathom the amount of time and effort involved in not only gathering these interviews, but putting them together in a coherent flow that jeopardized nothing in terms of story retelling. It never once mattered that I didn’t know who each person interviewed was, Bienstock and Beaujour not only included details about each interviewee at the start of every chapter (regardless of whether they’d been introduced previously or not), they also provided an alphabetical list in the front of the book detailing every person quoted throughout this 400 page compendium. I really can’t emphasize enough how impressive and monstrous Lollapalooza is.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading accounts of musicians I love, bands I’ve listened to for years, and people I’m only somewhat familiar with – the love that came out of so many people involved in the festival for 6 years is really something special. Without ruining it for you, it felt like the absolute height of nostalgia to read that so many people look back on their time with Lollapalooza with nothing but love, admiration, and joy. Described by multiple people over the course of multiple years as feeling like being part of a summer camp, the details of their exploits while not on stage, the highs of playing with their fellow touring bands, and the lows of addiction and alcoholism all set against the backdrop of teen angst, pre-internet, and exploration made for a deeply meaningful read. It was unexpected, to say the least.

So, then, why the 4 star review and not a 5? Well, Lollapalooza suffered from the antithesis of what Rise of a Killah suffered from : too much information. And I don’t mean to say that the details given were personal, though at times they were, or that they were shocking (largely, they weren’t) – what I mean to say is that by the time I reached page 300-ish, or what would be year 1996 of the festival, I was bored. There were too many overlapping stories, too many details about things I’d already read about, and as the tour was winding down, I cared a bit less about it than I did reading about 1991 – 1994. If anything, the book suffered the same fate Lollapalooza did. And perhaps that’s the shine of a great work, that the book literally mirrored what was happening in the tour at the time, but the magic was dwindling and my interest was fading. It’s easy to make me feel excited about the height of Lollapalooza in the early 90s, as grunge was gripping the nation, bands were finding their footing, and something new and exciting was happening with this new form of tour (in the US). It’s a challenge to make me excited to continue reading about the festival’s demise, the sell-out nature of alternative music into mainstream art, and the poor booking choices that ultimately led to the end of the festival, at the time; Bienstock and Beaujour didn’t succeed in this arena. Perhaps for a nostalgic Gen-X reader this will have a different feel than it did for me, but ultimately it cost a star for this Millennial reader.

Advice : If you’ve been a fan of counterculture, alternative music, grunge, or just love a music festival, I think the history involved will be of interest to you! If you love making the band or just enjoy a backstage look at all your favorite musician’s lives, this is a great read.

We Could Be Rats Review

Book: We Could Be Rats
Author: Emily Austin
Publisher: Atria Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal. Having always resisted the idea of “growing up” and the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend, Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Sigrid was never close with her older sister, Margit, who is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.
Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past, from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to losing Greta’s friendship amid the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.
What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters fingering their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakeable bond.”

Review : Before I dive into We Could Be Rats (WCBR), I would be remiss not to discuss some content warnings. Something I appreciated a great deal about Austin is that she included a singular content warning at the start of the book, a small blurb letting the reader know that suicide would be discussed. But, we can’t simply leave it at that. WCBR does not merely bring up the mention of suicide, it is an entire book about suicide; likewise, it more than mentions domestic violence – within varying familial structures. There are both discussions of and visceral scenes depicting traumatic triggers, discussions of opioid addiction, mental health struggles beyond the aforementioned suicide, sexual assault, and threats of public violence.

WCBR is not merely a stunning work of fiction by Austin, it is at times a funhouse of mirrors, frequently nostalgic, and wildly relatable all in one turn. Not content to simply give us a story, Austin has crafted a well-timed mind fuck of a novel (I think you’ll pardon my language after you read this instant hit). Told in thirds, Austin challenges the reader to steep themselves deeply within a broth of empathy through many, so, so many suicide note attempts through Sigrid’s lens, read as though through the eyes of her older sister, Margit. We spend the majority of WCBR weaving through thinly veiled confessions, dodging twists and turns thrown into the mix with the deft hand of a creative writing genius – I don’t use that term lightly. There were moments, moments I won’t even begin to describe for fear of giving too much away (perhaps to tempt you further to adding this one to your list of books this year), where I found myself skeptical of Austin’s writing, unsure of how her writing fit with the narrative I was being told to believe – enough so that I considered giving this book a 4 out of 5 stars. But then…well. Things changed.

The remaining two thirds of the book are told from the perspective of Margit and Sigrid, respectively. As the story unfolds in the most miraculously unpredictable and loping manner, we bare the honor of witnessing just how alike the two sisters are, despite a lifetime of misunderstanding, growth in opposite directions, and their shared trauma. Without realizing how intertwined their lives have been, Margit and Sigrid find their feet falling into step before they can even recognize what’s happening. Margit, the classic older sister, the protectress and truly the only adult-like figure in Sigrid’s life, finds comfort in caring for others in her own way – perhaps to the detriment of those she aims to care for. Sigrid, on the other hand, finds herself adrift, floating through life like a bird in a sea of monkeys, despite dreams and desires, taking a backseat to the hopelessness and despair of life in a deeply conservative small town struggling with an opioid crisis.

Austin weaves a palpable sensation of otherness into WCBR, I found myself slipping off the human realm of Paige the reader, sidling into Sigrid’s imaginative mindscape with ease. Sigrid feels deeply relatable to me, though I’m not sure this will be universally felt, as a twenty-year-old with no plan or idea for the future. Sigrid writes at times about not knowing yet who she is, of sliding into versions of the self that others wear, trying each on to see what fits best, slipping into the skin of those who know themselves and in doing so attempting to discover who she might be as well. At its core, WCBR is a story about the threads of family trauma that burrow into the lives of those whose lives are intimately touched by it, the threads that tie us to each other, and the ways in which we exist in the world as part of a whole because of, or in spite of them.

Austin asks us to move through the tangible grief within WCBR to see the beacons of light she’s offered in the sacred space of shared humanity. She doesn’t tug at us to touch these spaces, rather, as she gently guides us through we find that we cannot help but brush against them. The light seeps through no matter how hard we try to ignore it. And in doing so, we may just find our own shared connections with Sigrid and Margit – a tiny parcel of humanity of our own.

Advice : I wish you well on your journey into We Could Be Rats. I say so confidently because I feel so strongly that you should read this book. It’s beautiful, it flows well and reads quickly, and it’s an important story whose aspects will likely reach each reader in completely different ways. Add this one to your list.